The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky with an Introduction by David McDuff
trans. David McDuff
Penguin Classics, 920pp.
Near to the end of Dostoyevsky’s 1880 masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov, one of the brothers, Ivan Fyodorovich, suffering from an alcohol-related hallucinatory disorder delirium tremens, is visited by the Devil. It is first physical manifestation of the Devil in this work, and his final appearance in Dostoyevsky’s work, but this Devil has been a constant “symphonic motif”[1] throughout. The Devil’s appearance is more than symbolic of Ivan’s state of mind, the Devil points to the very heart of Dostoyevsky’s work.
As Dostoyevsky indicated in his letter of the 16 March 1878 to V. V. Mikhailov, The Brothers Karamazov was to have been a novel about children. It is through this letter that one can begin to systematically untwine the deeper concerns of the final novel. Dostoyevsky says,
I have conceived and will soon begin a large novel in which, inter alia, a major role will be played by children… I am studying them, I have been studying them all my life.
These thoughts connected with the tragic death of his own son, Alyosha, at a young age, and a subsequent visit to the Optina Hermitage a few months afterward, combine to show a man deeply interested in the question of truth. He is exploring, with depth, the realities of his world and the realities of other experience. It is a motif that has been echoing through Dostoyevsky’s work his whole life, and here in The Brothers Karamazov reaches its apotheosis. Truth, of its various and heterogeneous kinds, is revealed to the three brothers at the heart of this dark tale.
The manifestation of the Devil reveals to Ivan a particular truth, a subjective truth, concerning the question of belief:
‘What kind of belief is it that is forced upon a man? What is more, in the matter of belief no proof is of any avail, especially the material sort. Thomas believed not because he saw the risen Christ, but because he already desired to believe.’
For it is these questions that cut to the very heart of Ivan’s truth. He is a revolutionary intellectual, a fervent rationalist, with a certain belief: ‘It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.’ His belief is however deeply troubled, and as illustrated in one of the books most famous sections, The Grand Inquisitor, can shake the love of his family to its very core. In The Grand Inquisitor, Christ returns to Earth in Seville, during the Inquisition, and though he is loved and adored, the Grand Inquisitor has him arrested and sentenced to be burnt at the stake. The Grand Inquisitor pays one final visit to Christ where he refutes Christ and states:
‘Oh, we shall persuade them that they will only become free when they renounce their freedom for us and submit to us. And what does it matter whether we are right or whether we are telling a lie? They themselves will be persuaded we are right, for they will remember to what horrors of slavery and confusion your freedom has bought them. Freedom, the free intellect and science will lead them into such labyrinths and bring them up against such miracles and unfathomable mysteries that some of them, the disobedient and ferocious ones, will destroy themselves; others, disobedient and feeble, will destroy one another, while a third group, those who are left, the feeble and unhappy ones, will come crawling to our feet, and will cry out to us: ‘Yes, you were right, you alone were masters of his secret, and we are returning to you, save us from ourselves.’’
Ivan’s parable displays his deep disgust at the church and its powers, its truth that is designed solely to subjugate the common man. This is one of the truths that he refutes. This, it becomes clear with the manifestation of the Devil, has been Ivan’s quest, to find a truth that is real. The Devil, as we have shown, offers another truth, apposite to Christ and to the Church (the Devil essentially decries the church’s stance as shown in The Grand Inquisitor (‘What kind of belief is forced upon a man?’)). However, Ivan’s reaction is not too dissimilar to his to the church. It is a truth that he refutes:
‘Not for one moment do I take you for a truth that is real,’ Ivan exclaimed in what amounted to fury. ‘You are a falsehood, you are my illness, you are a ghost. Only I do not know how to destroy you, and perceive that for a certain time I must suffer you. You are a hallucination I am having. You are the embodiment of myself, but only of one side of me… of my thoughts and emotions.’
It is Ivan’s refutation of the Devil that finally accents his mental deterioration, for he is a man living in a world that – for him – can contain no truth. It is telling that Dostoyevsky follows the parable of The Grand Inquisitor with a detailed life of the religious figure featured most prominently in The Brothers Karamazov, that of Alyosha Karamazov’s mentor, Zosima the Elder.
Zosima is a figure we first see through Alyosha’s reverential eyes: ‘Father Zosima, the renowned Elder of our monastery, to whom he had attached himself with all the first ardent love of his quenchless heart.’ As seen, upon both the introduction of Alyosha and Zosima, we are revealed a depth of love and trust not seen within the Brothers Karamazov. The narrator of this tale, however, has a few pointed comments to make that reveal the truth of this unquestionable love and faith to be not as it first seems:
‘An Elder is someone who takes your soul and your will into his soul and his will. Having chosen an Elder, you give up your own will and render it unto him in full obedience, with full self-abnegation. This test, this terrible school of life is accepted voluntarily by the one who dooms himself in the hope, after long ordeals, of conquering himself, or mastering himself to a degree where he may at last attain by dint of lifelong obedience a total freedom, that is to say, freedom from himself, and avoid the lot of those who live all their lives without ever finding the self within themselves.’
From this passage it is ascertained that what Ivan sought at the bottom of a drink bottle and through his lifelong obedience to rationalist tendencies, Alyosha takes from religion. What is revealed to us is two brothers, both hiding from themselves and from the truth of their family.
Zosima’s truth, we later learn, is not as it first appears. He is a man, who through necessity has hidden the truth of his former life. We learn in The Russian Monk that Zosima had a rebellious youth and that he only finds his faith whilst in the middle of a duel. It is the threat of imminent death that guides Zosima to his true path in life. Zosima reports that one must forgive others by acknowledging their own sins and guilt before others; that no sin is isolated, making everyone responsible for their neighbour’s sin. This philosophy, opposite to Ivan’s, is another truth.
The final brother at the heart of this epic novel is Mitya. He is a man driven by more base and carnal desire. He is a sensualist, like his father, and because of this they often clash. Mitya spends large amounts of money on debauched nights, fuelled with champagne, women and whatever else his money can buy. It is his conflict with his father over the same woman, Grushenka, which proves his undoing. Mitya’s truth makes no need of God or the Devil, but simply money.
If, as Dostoyevsky says in his introduction, ‘[The Brothers Karamazov] consists of two novels’, then the first novel is a novel of each characters truth, of their devotion to a way of life – Alyosha to religion, Ivan to rationality, and Mitya to money – then the second novel is a dramatic shift. Fyodor Karamazov, the brothers’ father, is murdered and a sensational trial is launched when Mitya is arrested for the crime.
The trial reflects upon the different beliefs so far explored in the novel. The murder trial is a literal exposition and contradiction of Zosima’s tenet, for it questions whether one man alone can be held accountable for the murder of another. If Zosima preaches that each sin is connected, how can Mitya alone be responsible for the death of his father?
The truth of the novel is that each of the brothers played a part in his father’s murder: Mitya had the motive (the love of Grushenka, the three thousand roubles that are key point of concern), Ivan can justify the killing through rationalism, whilst Alyosha did nothing to prevent his brothers from committing their actions, though he knew of their desires.
Mitya’s sentence mirrors Ivan’s argument in The Grand Inquisitor: that man is fundamentally weak and wants to be told the true nature of right and wrong, a truth supplied by the jury.
The final chapter of the book, The Speech by the Stone, returns us not only to Dostoyevsky’s original intention for The Brothers Karamazov, but also to what is his final decree on the question of truth. Alyosha has come home for the funeral of Ilyusha, a schoolboy known to Alyosha and whose life has provided a central backbone to the novel. His death prompts Alyosha to speak to the children who had once bullied Ilyusha but who had finally become his friends:
‘So let us here, by Ilyusha’s stone, agree that we shall never forget – in the first place, Ilyushechka, and in the second, one another. And whatever may befall us subsequently in life, even though we do not meet for twenty years hereafter – all the same let us remember how we buried the poor boy, the one at whom you formerly threw stones, do you remember, down there by the bridge? – but whom everyone came to love so later. He was a wonderful boy, a kind and brave boy, he had a sense of the honour and of the bitter insult that his father bore, and for which he rose up. So, in the first place, let us remember, gentlemen, all our lives. And even though we may be occupied with the most important matters, attain honours or fall into some great misfortune – all the same let us never forget how good we found it here, all of us in association, for the poor boy has possibly made us better than we are in actual fact.’
The final truth Alyosha and this novel impart is not a religious truth or a rational truth or a base truth, it is a truth simply of the heart. Love another and be kind. For it is through this, and this alone, Alyosha and the reader have learns, ‘memory alone will keep him from great evil’. Memory of love and being loved. For it is love that tore his family apart, or rather an impure love. And this is the truth.
Sigmund Freud called this book, “The most magnificent novel ever written”, whilst James Joyce said, “The Brothers Karamazov… made a deep impression on me… he created some unforgettable scenes [detail]… Madness you may call it, but therein may be the secret of his genius… I prefer the word exaltation, exaltation which can merge into madness, perhaps. In fact all great men have had that vein in them; it was the source of their greatness; the reasonable man achieves nothing.” And this is the truth of this novel, one of the finest in any language.
[1] McDuff xxiv, Introduction to The Brothers Karamazov, Penguin Edition 1993
